You should love what you do, not do what you love

This is a person that loves what he's doing.
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Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, asked me, along with a number of other people to tell him what they learned in 2015.

Most people opt for jokes. I opted for an earnest answer.

I learned a lot in 2015. But as the year came to a close, one thought kept rattling around in my head. And it's what I told Brown: You should love what you do rather than do what you love.

A lot of people say, "Pursue your dreams/passions." I think successful people don't do actually do that. Instead they fall in love with what they're doing, which is much more important.

I am now executive editor of Business Insider. I was not one of those people that grew up dreaming of running a newspaper. I became a journalist after doing a lot of other stuff along the way. But once I started in this job, I fell in love with the writing, reporting, the creativity, and, in particular at this company, the ability to help build a new media brand.

Looking back, this job ties together all sorts of things I am passionate about. But, even when I started I had no idea how much I would love the work.

I see examples of this sort of thing all over the place.

In a recent podcast, with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman he said the way he decided to launch Yelp is that he saw Craigslist was killing the classifieds section of newspapers. That inspired him to look around and see if there were any other old media businesses that would be transformed by the internet.

He said the answer to his questions was right in front of his face. The big Yellow Pages books that were being used as a base on his computer monitor were clearly due for a disruption. He, and his team, went on to turn Yelp into a company valued at more than $7 billion at its peak.

Stoppleman didn't have some yearning passion in his life to help small businesses get user generated reviews. He had a passion to build a company, and then he went looking for an idea.

Look at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with a bunch of other people in his dorm room. Facebook in the early days was not his sole focus. He was working on another company called Wirehog that did file sharing. He didn't have a driving passion in the early days for photosharing and status updates. But, over time he realized how great Facebook was and he fell in love with the project and its mission to make the world more open and connected.

In Steve Jobs' Stanford speech he outlines this idea pretty clearly, but for the longest time I misunderstood what he was saying.

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

For the longest time, I thought Jobs was saying figure out what you love and then go do that. For a lot of people that would mean trying to make money watching football, eating buffalo wings, and hanging out their friends. Which I don't believe is particularly lucrative.

What he is actually saying is that you need to love what you're doing. If you love what you're doing, then it will turn into your passion and your work will be great, and your life will be great.